Here's a recent interview with John Hagel and John Seely Brown.

How can their companies develop a sustainable competitive edge that can keep them ahead of the competition?

While traditionally strategic advantage was based on geographic distance or core competencies, which were typically defined as static, increasingly the only sustainable edge has to do with the capacity to accelerate capability building. Companies must be able to build distinctive capabilities more rapidly than anyone else. What we focus on are management techniques that are emerging to help build that kind of dynamic strategic advantage.

It's a set of tools that can facilitate people at the edge being able to perform serious new work, because in this rapidly changing world, you need a constantly evergreen set of capabilities. Your sustainability depends on your ability to develop these capabilities before anybody else.

Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge?

John Seely Brown ("The Social Life of Information") has a new book. Back in April, Tom Friedman said, "...check out [this] smart new book by the strategists John Hagel III and John Seely Brown." From the looks of it, Brown and Hagel's ideas in this book made a significant impact on Friedman's latest thinking as reflected in "The World Is Flat."

Many firms have used outsourcing and offshoring to shave costs and reduce operating expenses. But as opportunities for innovation and growth migrate to the peripheries of companies, industries, and the global economy, efficiency will no longer be enough to sustain competitive advantage.

The only sustainable advantage in the future will come from an institutional capacity to work closely with other highly specialized firms to get better faster. Enabled by the emergence of global process networks, firms will undergo a three-stage transformation: deepening specialization within firms; mobilizing best-in-class capabilities across enterprises; and, ultimately, accelerating learning across broad networks of enterprises.

Hagel and Seely Brown discuss the strategic levers that will accelerate this migration, and they outline a new approach to strategy development that will help companies capture this shifting source of strategic advantage.

Calling for a forceful reinvention of business strategy and the very nature of the firm itself, this bold and forward-looking book reveals what every company must do today to become tomorrow’s market leader.

The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization

In one of the most entertaining presentations from OSCON 2004, Paul Graham answers the questions:

What motivates great hackers?
What do they need to do their jobs?
How do you recognize them?
How do you get them to come and work for you?
And how can you become one?

What Motivates Great Hackers?

In a finding that may someday benefit the socially manipulative as well as the socially awkward, Swiss researchers are reporting that doses of a natural hormone significantly increased the level of trust that people placed in strangers who were handling their money.

The study, which appears in today's issue of the journal Nature, is the first to show that a simple administration of a hormone in humans can consistently alter something as socially sensitive as trust.

Hormone Dose May Increase People's Trust in Strangers

If misery loves company, then there is solace in knowing that many people bristle at the mere thought of being Googled because of the photographs, news clippings or blog entries that they feel do not reflect who they really are. Such is the plight of the Google-ee.

"With information that's put on the Internet, you pretty much have to assume it will be around forever."

The secret to burying unflattering Web details about yourself is to create a preferred version of the facts on a home page or a blog of your own, then devise a strategy to get high-ranking Web sites to link to you.

From here on out, I will live by a new creed: Google unto others as you would have them Google unto you.

Loosing Google's Lock on the Past

Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn't already believe? If so, are there enough places where this mingling of minds occurs to sustain a democracy? The signs are not good.

Is Persuasion Dead?

MBM has a new album. (Long-time fans take note: the jazziness of this album is something of a departure -- more Spooky than Subliminal, if you will.)

In Meat Beat Manifesto’s nearly twenty-year existence, what began as a collaboration with fellow Perennial Divide member Jonny Stephens quickly became a revolving door forum for multi-instrumentalist Jack Dangers’ investigations into sonic possibilities and contemporary electronica rhythms.

For more than 20 years, Meat Beat Manifesto has remained on the cutting edge of sound design.

At the root of MBM's work is rhythm -- sometimes hypnotic, elsewhere more insistently dance-floor. But it’s more than just about the beat. "Want Ads One" and "Want Ads Two" have a deadpan voice reading a series of seemingly disconnected newspaper ads that just might reveal a greater link on further examination.

(These "Want Ads" tracks are creepy, by the way.)

'At The Center' - Meat Beat Manifesto

The marketing clout required to generate an audience will make it harder for smaller players.

"Marketing is getting much harder as people's attention gets fragmented."

Still, word of mouth and community building can work.

With Audiences Fragmenting, Marketing Faces New Challenges

Steve Jobs cast doubt on Yahoo's announcement of a $60-per-year music subscription plan, saying that price point was "substantially" below Yahoo's costs and would be raised. Mr. Jobs then claimed Apple employees had a betting pool on when Yahoo would raise the $5-a-month rate, with Mr. Jobs putting his money on five months.

Notes from the D: All Things Digital conference | WSJ

A year-and-a-half ago, I invested in Visible path, a social-networking company totally dedicated to enterprise relationship management. Visible Path is built on search technology using algorithms to look at data, like Google. Where Google looks at Web pages and links, Visible Path looks at people pathways. They'll be lots more applications developed using search the same way we used relational databases 25 years ago. It's a different way of looking at the network of data.

The numbers are unbelievable in the software world. The top 15 software companies are 84% of the revenues in the industry. The top three generate 75% of the profit, and the top one generates 57% of the profit. [Underneath that] it's becoming a wasteland.

Ego. It's all about ego. The way I look at it is: If you knew you had five years to live, would you give those five years to shareholders, would you give it to entrepreneurs, or would you give it to kids? How do you want to spend your time?

What I want to do now is: I want to have a Google. Visible Path is a candidate.

A Bad Case of Google Envy